Earth

Do George Clooney and Sandra Bullock know about this?

The Potsdam Gravity Potato (real thing) isn't actually what the Earth would look like without water, but it's a great reminder that our seemingly solid and uniform planet is actually a strange and alien place in its own way.

Wibbly wobbly timey wimey!

Time is an illusion. Lunch time, doubly so. The timeline of our planet's 4.5 billion year geological history? Well you can just forget about making sense of that yourself, good sirs. What you need is a giant, elaborately detailed chart for that sort of thing.

Even older if you're a Young Earth creationist.

So you know that planet that crashed into Earth billions of years ago and formed the Moon? Geochemists who've been studying this phenomenon think that the impact occurred much earlier than we thought -- which means that the Earth and Moon are also older than we'd calculated.

"S'up, Earth? Uranus and Neptune say hello."

Imagine that gravitational forces were completely irrelevant and Saturn just decided to pop by for a visit en route to the Sun. I don't know; maybe it wanted to go on a playdate with the Moon or something. I heard they're pretty tight. Anyway, this video is pretty mathematically accurate to what that encounter would look like.

Set phasers to sadness.

It's a sad day for fans of Star Trek Voyager : Captain Kathryn Janeway herself is lending her voice to a "documentary" about how the Sun revolves around the Earth and how NASA is leading a conspiracy to keep the truth away from us. Oh, boy.

Guys, these things are seriously older than dirt.

Unless you believe Jesus rode around on dinosaurs, the Earth is pretty darn old. It's hard to learn about the Earth's formation now that pretty much everything here has undergone massive changes since then, which is why scientists are so excited to have found the oldest surviving fragment of the Earth ever in the form of a tiny zircon crystal.

A dingo did not eat our rover.

The Curiosity rover is a long way from home, boys and girls, and this shot of what the Earth looks like from where it is on Mars is a reminder of just how far that is. Across the cold, empty reaches of space, the rover has taken a picture of the home of all seven billion humans, and it looks like just a tiny speck.

The bad news is that death, however slow its approach, continues to be inescapable.

We know you were all worried about the possibility of our sun becoming too hot and eventually drying up all the Earth's oceans with its fiery wrath. Well, it's okay! You can all relax now. It's probably going to happen a few billion years later than we thought it would, so we have plenty of time to destroy the planet ourselves first.